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Maintenance is essential to the proper function of any machine on the job site. By performing regular preventative maintenance, you can avoid the inconvenience and expense of a sudden breakdown. Furthermore, best practices in budgeting for maintenance and repair costs can help you keep your machines running smoothly and prevent lost income due to equipment downtime. Therefore, it is crucial to make sure that your machines are properly maintained in order to avoid costly repairs and lost productivity.
Our Recommendations for Uptime on Your Crucial Construction Assets
Preventative upkeep is essential in making sure your machines are available at all times. If a sudden breakdown occurs, it can leave an operator with little to do and an asset that’s unable to perform. Because breakdowns are never expected, your finances may not be ready to cover an extensive repair, either. When you apply best practices to your budgeting schedule, you can anticipate the costs of maintenance and repairs.
Construction machinery is a crucial component business, and downtime can be very costly. In fact, a 1% drop in equipment productivity can lead to almost a 3% drop in profits. That's why it's so important to regularly inspect your machines for wear and tear. By catching problems early, you can avoid costly repairs down the line. In order to best catch problems before they become downtime for your operation, we recommend checklist of five buckets to make sure your business can measure and adjust as needed. By taking these precautions, you can keep your business running smoothly and avoid any unexpected setbacks.
1. Commit to Asset Maintenance Program
By regularly inspecting, replacing, and modifying components, as well as performance testing and analyzing results, preventative maintenance can identify potential problems before they become expensive or even dangerous repairs. Committing to a preventative maintenance schedule does more than just regular upkeep because it’s an all-inclusive approach. The key is to have systems and subsystems that support one another. In other words, your "program" should have a tangible infrastructure as well as employee involvement to be successful.
Who Should Be Responsible?
When it comes to preventive maintenance plans, who is responsible for administering the plan depends on the size of the company. In small operations where the owner is more hands-on, they often times are the ones overseeing the program. However, in larger operations, it is usually delegated to a fleet manager or head technician. The best choice is always someone who knows the equipment and has the dedication to see the plan succeed.
Having someone dedicated to preventive maintenance and monitoring the asset tracking software documentation is a highly important part of a preventive maintenance program because it allows for accurate planning. It also produces accurate reports when necessary for inspections or defending litigation.
2. Know Your Asset's Preventative Maintenance Needs
Product knowledge is necessary if you want an effective maintenance schedule. With proper tagging and inputs from your crew, your construction asset tracking software becomes a library of tasks and knowledge for later use and training. You can find what you need by referring to the equipment or tool manual, but you can also see the smart data tied to the asset ID. Anyone working on the equipment should understand the handbooks, and track the state of equipment before and after maintenance and use. A well maintained database relays information on the unit’s service intervals, what products to use, typical operating conditions and troubleshooting tips.
By tying data to your tools, equipment, inventory and other essential assets, you can better understand the efficiency opportunities in your preventative maintenance routines. Dates of purchase, manuals, hours of operation and use, and more can be tied directly to the equipment which allows for better preventative measures to take place.
3. Modify Your Asset Maintenance Plans As Needed
Today’s business environment is dynamic and ever-changing. As such, your preventative maintenance program must be flexible enough to adapt to new conditions. This might mean revising inspection schedules, adding new checklists or making changes to protocols based on feedback from employees. The bottom line is that your program should be constantly evolving to meet the needs of your business.
What Changes Would Require Modification to My Plan?
Servicing milestones and intervals are moving targets that depend on variable factors, such as seasonal changes, working environments and equipment operation time. The best advice comes from a combination of the machinery owner's manual and the experience of on-site operators and maintainers. Often, milestones include engine running hours, traveling distance in miles and general equipment condition and age. Based on these factors, machinery owners or operators can develop a servicing schedule that meets the specific needs of their machine while also taking into account their budget and the environment in which the machine will be used.
A simple example of this scenario is winterizing your construction equipment for cold weather operation. Mother nature doesn't always give fair warning that the conditions of the work are going to change drastically. The hydraulic fluids, lubricants, oil and fuel will likely be different than standard summer offerings so the equipment can function in the conditions. For some, this means using their tool tracking software to keep essential inventory stocked in preparation. For others, this could even mean tracking larger items usually kept in storage like enclosed operator cabs to the equipment.
4. Perform Regular Construction Asset Testing
In addition to regular inspections, you should also perform periodic testing of equipment and systems. This helps to verify that everything is functioning properly and that all safety procedures are being followed correctly. Testing also provides an opportunity to identify any potential problems so they can be addressed before they cause major damage. Some diagnostic tools can be universal while some specific tools can be tied to one-off components. Simply- not all of them are universal.
For larger scale operations, adding visibility to the wide variety of diagnostic tools you have at your disposal is no longer about asking where the lube-tech last saw the tools. Stop guessing where the items are or allowing them to be buried and forgotten by seeing them at a glance with real-time tool asset tracking provided by RedBeam.
5. Analyze Your Results
Once you’ve gathered data from inspections and testing, it’s time to analyze the results. This information can then be used to make decisions about repairs, replacements and modifications to your preventative maintenance program. By constantly monitoring the performance of your equipment and systems, you can ensure that they remain safe and reliable for years to come.
This analysis can also play a critical component in the swapping out of assets for newer models as efficiencies start to suffer from worn equipment or tools. Small amounts of time add up quickly on projects and can have negative effects on forecasted budgets. The resulting data tied to your asset tracking software can also help keep compliance when financial matters are involved. Continual tracking of assets could be considered this your backlog of accountability.
The Most Impactful Construction Maintenance Outcomes
When an asset is reliable, it's safer for your operators to use, making them feel more confident in their work. Furthermore, if you ever want to sell or trade in your equipment, keeping the integrity of your assets up to par will boost their value. Therefore, ensuring that your assets are reliable is not only beneficial for your operators but also for the overall lifetime and value of your equipment.
RedBeam believes in the importance of routine and preventive maintenance service because we believe in business efficiencies. With over 18 years of experience, RedBeam has helped thousands of businesses track and manage their valuable assets. Our easy-to-use software makes it simple to know what you have, where they are, and how they impact your bottom line. Whether you're a small business or a Fortune 500 company, schedule a demo with RedBeam to get control of your assets.
